Upstate trucker Joe Macken’s TikTok-famous scale model of New York City will be displayed at the Museum of the City of New York this winter, Gothamist can exclusively report.
“He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model” will open to the public early next year, on Feb. 12, 2026.
“Presented publicly for the first time in New York City—the very subject of the work—Macken’s model stands as a deeply personal yet universally resonant tribute to the city,” reads a press release.
Macken, 63, began building the monumental 50-by-30-foot model in his Clifton Park, NY basement back in 2004. Over the subsequent two decades, Macken – who has neither formal carpentry nor engineering training – used only balsa wood, Elmer’s glue, and Styrofoam to create miniature versions of every building in the five boroughs. Upon completion this April, “I jumped outta my chair and I cheered,” he said. Soon after, he relegated his creation (built on separate panels, for ease of breakdown) into a storage unit, where it collected dust until his kids encouraged him to post about it on TikTok.
Joseph Macken, 63, with his scale model of Manhattan
It became a viral a hit, and in August one of his work clients invited him to give the finished work its first public display, at the Cobleskill Fairgrounds near Albany. It proved as much of a hit in person as it was online. Soon after, the Museum got in touch.
When Elisabeth Sherman began as MCNY’s Chief Curator and Deputy Director this September, she was informed that the museum was in touch with Macken, and formalized his exhibit.
“This is absolutely the kind of celebration of the city, but also the kind of artistic vision that often goes uncelebrated or unacknowledged that I am personally very interested in highlighting,” Sherman said. “It’s been a great joy to work on as one of my first projects at the museum.”
While Macken’s model is in many ways similar to the Queens Museum’s famous “Panorama” (Macken visited the scale model while growing up in Middle Village, Queens and said it significantly inspired his work), Sherman hesitates to compare the two.
The “Panorama” displays an institutional view of New York, while Joe’s model is personal: “It’s his view from Middle Village, looking towards Manhattan. It’s his hand, it’s his technique, it carries so much of his own personality,” she explained. “While he's not sharing intimate personal stories in the model itself, it feels to me like it's really communicating one person's personal New York,” his own lived “psychogeography of the city.”
As Colson Whitehead once put it, “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now,” when you have, he said, your “own personal skyline.”
In Macken’s Model, the original World Trade Centers still stand.
“Joe’s model reflects the wonder and complexity of this city through the eyes of someone who has lived it, loved it, and painstakingly rebuilt it,” said Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, Ronay Menschel Director and President of MCNY in a press release. “We are honored to debut this remarkable work at the Museum.”
As for Macken, he’s very excited.
“I can’t wait,” he said in a phone interview while on his truck route. He’s still working. Though he’d like to retire and build miniatures full-time, that’s not an option quite yet. “Getting it out there, having people see it, especially down in the city. I think it’s gonna work out really well.”
He plans to drive the model downstate himself, very slowly, in a rented 25-foot U-Haul. “I know exactly how to do it where it’s not gonna move around too much and it’ll be pretty stable,” he said. Namely, he has to stack the outer borough panels first, “because those are the flat ones.” Manhattan and its skyscrapers go on top.
He managed it for the Cobleskill display with only one casualty, the Throggs Neck Bridge, which he was easily able to repair, so he’s not too worried.
In the meantime, he’s been building New Jersey.
